Sarah Carten, Day 5

So I was back at the grocery store again today, aiming to spend my last $3.19. It’s disconcerting to have such a firm cut-off point for cash. Craving nothing in particular for a mere $3, I decided to first comb the aisles to get a sense of what was available at that price point. As I wandered the store, I found many foods both healthy and not healthy for $3.19, but for the most part nothing enticed.

I decided on fresh produce and picked out a zucchini that I weighed to find out how much it would cost. With a guess of 70 cents (erring on the side of caution in case the scale was off), I headed to the Winter squash bin for my second item. Thus began several minutes of digging for and retrieving squash of various sizes, weighing one, adding it to the cost of the zucchini, and then subtracting from $3.19 to see if a can of tuna from the dollar store could also fit within my budget. I would then find a smaller squash, weigh it, estimate, add, subtract. Too small. Weigh, estimate, add, subtract. Weigh, estimate, add, subtract. I admit to being pretty self-conscious of how long I had been hovering by the scale in my seemingly obsessive search for the perfect sized squash, making my math calculations come that much more slowly.